There are blow jobs and then there are blow jobs. The volumes at
hand deal with both figurative and literal examples of the genre. And
they manage to range over, as well as map, the landscape of what is
loosely called print journalism in book form. They reveal not just
hidden agendas, but the transformation journalism has undergone at the
end of the twentieth century.

One might first note the obvious: they are all written by men. There
are books written by women inspired by Bill Clinton's life and loves
(Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning), but these are, in the main,
reminiscences. Ann Coulter, the author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors:
The Case Against Bill Clinton, who can be called a journalist (if not
being called something else: lawyer, elf, part of the right wing
conspiracy, etc.), would doubtless be the best seller of the small
journalistic sorority mining the Clinton lode, her contribution being in the
attack biography genre, with Elizabeth Drew standing in as the more
respectable, though stodgier, contender, her Clinton books lagging behind in sales. The
skewed proportions of male versus female authors writing about Bill
Clinton at book length would not matter much, except that one can
readily detect the very mano a mano tone the male authors share. Bill
Clinton is the representative generational male figure; he is the norm
from which their standard deviations are measured.

But it is journalistic practice that is chiefly under consideration
and on display here: we have Bob (and that Bob is the only informal
thing about him) Woodward's sui generis sort, in the sense that he
(along with Carl Bernstein) is credited with inventing it. During the
heady days of the mid-seventies, when there was a New Journalist lurking
behind every mailbox, there came to be the hugely successful hybrid
example of All the President's Men, which was taken as a subset of the
form by most commentators of its time. Of course, the most substantial
difference went unmentioned: New Journalists were almost all freelance
writers. Thumb through Tom Wolfe's 1973 anthology The New Journalism and
look at the names. Almost none were staff writers of well-established
publications (of the 23 listed, only Rex Reed, Richard Goldstein, and
"Adam Smith" would be the exceptions - Gay Talese had worked for the New
York Times, but freelancing, by and large, went with the territory.)

As the years have gone by, Woodward's name alone has graced the
cover of his successive books, co-authors having been long discarded,
though the reader is usually treated to a fulsome thanks for a
remarkable underling, (from the example Shadow provides) one (Jeff
Glasser) who serves as Bob's "assistant and collaborator for the last
three years," one who "tirelessly and resourcefully" labors in his
behalf.

A reader can be forgiven if he or she is reminded of the
acknowledgments prefacing a politician's ghosted recollections when
encountering such gratitude for able staff assistance, because Woodward
over the years has become a Senator of the 4th Estate, and as the voice
of official Washington, he is now more politician than journalist. And
who would deny him the luxury of a staff?

By never letting go of a position at The Washington Post,
Woodward has fashioned himself into a pillar of the establishment. In
the old days, his and Bernstein's information collecting technique was,
by necessity (with the large exception of "Deep Throat"), bottom up. For
a number of books now (Veil, The Commanders, The Agenda, The Choice) his
interviewing has been top down. The ditch, the rough patch in the road,
that brought about the permanent change was Woodward's one
non-Washington book, Wired, his excursion into the life of the actor
John Belushi, Bob's first book without a co-author in tow. That scary
experience (bad reviews, fewer sales, tagged as an outsider) appears to
have taught him a number of lessons.

One might have been to listen more carefully to his long-time
editor, Alice Mayhew, who suggested the topic that turned into Shadow.
Woodward writes that Mayhew "rekindled" his interest in the subject of the
presidents he had written about. Mayhew was interested in book making
and, taking away the pomp from Woodward's description of the process,
showed him how to put together a book from the parts he left out of the
other books. Woodward, though, doesn't make clear what he already knew
and what he has newly learned, but one can assume he missed a number of
things in his original investigations of the same ground. To do so would
have required Woodward to critique himself, which he is loathe to do.
Nonetheless, we are treated to a reprise of the Nixon years, the brief
Ford tenure, Carter's single term, then Reagan and Bush, all
accomplished in 223 pages, less than half the length Part Five takes,
the Bill Clinton years. But the premise of Shadow's subtitle created one
problem, a real stretch for Woodward.

If there is a "legacy" of Watergate, how does one discuss that if
the author himself is a large part of that legacy? Woodward did not go
away; he has become an institution himself. Beyond the trademark
you-are-there transcript recreations that have been his narrative style
and device (producing results which always sound like high school actors
badly reciting sententious historical drama), he would finally have to
step out from behind the curtain and analyze, or, at least, draw some
conclusions from his amassed gab fests, tell us just what the legacy,
the lesson, of Watergate is. So he tries mightily. Here it is,
Woodward's summation, his lessons hard learned that future presidents
need heed: "First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts,
whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not
allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressman
or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and
warfare."

It may be hard to see the forest from the trees, if one is a tree
oneself, but Woodward does seem to miss the point. His books nourished
leaks into more than plants; he left the emperor without any clothes and
then complained that the ruler was naked. In Sixties-speak, one doesn't
have a solution if one is part of the problem and Woodward doesn't see
himself as part of the problem.

It is not so much Woodward's use of anonymous sources that is
bothersome, as it is his wooden use of the "omniscient" point of view. Such
a literary device begs for sophisticated abilities, abilities which
Woodward lacks almost totally. In that regard he appears amateurish. But
it is not just Woodward's use of "fictional" techniques that's the
problem, it's the unreality of the world his style produces. If he wrote
fiction he might be judged the equivalent of the romance writer Danielle
Steel; but she doesn't improve either, no matter how many books she
publishes. The impact of the "new journalism," at least for the fiction
writers who produced it, was substantial, because they were very good
writers of fiction to begin with. In an age of recorded speech (from the
Watergate Tapes to Linda Tripp's), Woodward's age, there is endless
proof that no one ever talks like Bob Woodward has people talk.

Be that as it may, in Woodward World the style is not the point. It
is the information, or the attribution, which is important. He has long
become the establishment's Linda Tripp, recreating over the years so
much "conversation" thought once upon a time to be private. He said
that? She said that? Official Washington wants to know.

It was clear in the seventies that even though a number of so-called
progressive journalists could have explained Watergate and its players
to the country with remarkable precision, it required a powerful
corporate entity to "uncover" it: "...of the Washington Post" was the
Siamese twin label attached to both Woodward and Bernstein's names and
it was that "inc," not printer's ink, that was opening doors.

It is the point that Michael Isikoff, a self-described child of
Watergate, makes - well, he doesn't actually make it, he lets it be
made - in his contribution to Clinton studies, Uncovering Clinton.

Isikoff relegates it to a footnote: "Tripp also claimed I'd told her
that, while I doubted she'd find a publisher 'in the present climate,'
she should work with me to 'allow some of this to get out into the
mainstream media' in order to create a more favorable environment. This,
too, is ridiculous." What is ridiculous, Isikoff argues, is that he
would have settled for part of the story, not the bit about the power of the
"mainstream media."

The lesson learned, by the nineties, had become subliminal: if some
important publication doesn't run with your news, it will have no legs.
Goldberg and Tripp had absorbed the truth of that, which is why they
left so much room on their dance card for Spikey (their affectionate
name for Isikoff.) Given the example of Matt Drudge (the other
reporter, other than Isikoff, who made a national name for himself on
the back of Lewinsky), some have concluded that there is now an openness
of information, a healthy flow from high to low, but one has to consider
if Drudge himself would have made such a noise if his website headline
had been "National Enquirer spikes story of Clinton Oval Office
affair...."

One of the many things that all the books under discussion here have
in common is their open obeisance to caste and status. Woodward, in
Shadow, describing the Clinton White House trying to decide where to leak
documents, writes, "Fabiani didn't want to give the material to some
pro-Clinton reporter or someone who covered politics. Instead, he
selected Michael Isikoff, a hard-nosed junkyard-dog investigator who
worked for a publication, Newsweek, with wide national circulation."
There are a number of interesting things to point out in that second
uninteresting sentence. One is that if Woodward did write it he might
have felt obliged to mention that Isikoff was his former colleague at
The Washington Post. And, at the Post, Isikoff was the "investigator"
who worked the Clinton scandal beat, not so much for the delectation of
the public, but for the personal gossip-hungry knowledge of the Post's
editors. They wanted to be in the know, even if they didn't intend to
pass on the information to the paper's readers. But, Woodward, at least,
is being forthcoming with his depiction of Isikoff as an "investigator."
Nowhere in Isikoff's book do you learn from Isikoff what the writing
process is at Newsweek. He and other field reporters file reports,
reams of material, much like the FBI field agents' 302s, full of raw
data and sporadic narrative. Editors, or writers, at Newsweek's New York
office, turn the material into stories. The only time Isikoff refers to
that process is in his acknowledgments: "Assistant managing editor Evan
Thomas lent his considerable writing talents to all that appeared in the
magazine and gave wise counsel at every stage."

So, Woodward labels Isikoff correctly, an investigator, while at the
same time disowning any human connection to him. Such admissions don't
come easily to Woodward, and one of the strangest excursions is his
description of his and Ben Bradlee's meeting with Jimmy Carter: "Carter
had lied about his meeting with us." The sentence before that
declaration is: "I called Powell to complain and told him that we felt
sandbagged, summoned to an off-the-record meeting, led to believe one
story and now confronted with a well-publicized version - Carter's own
interpretation apparently - that conveyed a rather different impression."

Yes, I might not admit that I know and work with the people I write
about, but I am pissed when the President puts his own spin on a meeting
that was supposed to be off the record, one that we were "summoned" to!
The idea that the President would waste our time, have the nerve to
summon us.

Well, you see the pecking order Bob swears by. They needed to be
summoned to a meeting; not that they would bother to talk to the Prez
privately unless they had nothing more important to do. This meeting was
about whether or not CIA payments to King Hussein had stopped under
Carter's watch.

Woodward is still having trouble with the analysis thing; with the
exception of, say, his death-bed conversation with the old CIA Director
William J. Casey, he doesn't like to be out on the paper stage himself.

Given the history of Woodward's methods, he is something of an
"investigator" himself, more of the Isikoff school and tradition, than,
say, the one-man-bands of I. F. Stone, or Murray Kempton, or A. J.
Liebling, or for that matter, David Halberstam, or J. Anthony Lukas
(after they left The New York Times.) Yet, Woodward is more powerful
than any of that brethren. He might be a naif when it comes to using the
first person, but he isn't as naive as George Stephanopoulos appears to
be.

Now, I'm not saying George Stephanopoulos is naive: he's made his
way in the world by being very savvy indeed. But, he is naive when it
comes to employing a literary form. All Too Human is just that, a
bildungsroman, a growing up book that has yet to reach grownup stage.
But it is not without its savvyiness. From its "Note on sourcing": "I
did not keep a diary while I worked in the White House, but on about a
dozen weekend afternoons at that time, I had a series of conversations
with my friend Eric Alterman. Eric, who was working on his dissertation
in American history at Stanford University, taped and stored these talks
to create a historical record. After I left the White House he allowed
me to use this material for my book." George is being Clintonian in the
extreme. That this taping does not fall under the legal definition of a
"diary" would be convincing only to a lawyer. But, hey, he's the altar
boy, the keeper of Clinton's secrets. And he was certainly blown away by
Bob Woodward. George was so taken with Woodward he gave carte blanche to
him for Woodward's book, The Agenda. Here are his first thoughts about the
Bobster: "In the summer of 1993, several months into his project [The
Agenda], Wooodward's first call to me had sparked two simultaneous
thoughts: Oh, no! and I have arrived."

Seduced by Woodward's "stature," George "encouraged friends and
allies...to cooperate with Woodward." But Stephanopoulos shares more
with Monica Lewinsky than the willingness to be seduced (and their
books' similar glossy, white, innocent covers, graced with flattering
photographs.) Any number of times in All Too Human is this sort of
depiction of his relationship with the president: "But, at that point,
doing the president's bidding was my reason for being; his favor was my
fuel."

There has been a major shift in the career paths of most reporters
during my lifetime. During the early sixties, when I was in college,
journalism schools were the educational capstone for young reporters to
be. The idea of a Neiman Fellowship was as close to a post-doc as any
one could hope for. But, around that time, there was talk, as the
post-WWII "professionalization" of the profession became complete, of
having lawyer-reporters covering courts, economists covering the
economy. But, like the maps one sees of how a virus can quickly spread,
what was once the exception soon became the rule.

Now, reporting is largely conducted by what I term creatures of the
event. Especially in video land. As Eisenhower long ago pointed to the
revolving door of the military-industrial complex, there has long been a
government-journalism complex at work. First one worked for someone on the hill,
or for some failed campaign, or as a speech writer for brain-dead
politicians, and then one became a journalist. Watching cable news today
is like visiting a hiring hall full of former campaign consultants.

The smaller world of campaign books also provides an apt
illustration. There was Teddy White for many years, then Joe McGinnis,
then Hunter Thompson, then Carville and Matalin. In 1994 their jointly
written book became the new model: creatures of the event who give their
own self-censoring versions of history. And their book, All's Fair,
because of their celebrity status, became the most prominent one on the
'92 campaign. (Joe Klein, an actual journalist, felt it necessary to
retreat into fiction [in Primary Colors] to tell the "truth" of the
campaign as he saw it. Anonymity became a stand-in for objectivity.
Because one couldn't immediately tell the bias at work, the agenda that
was being worked out. And, who knew, the author could be someone
famous!)

The O. J. trial became the final straw in the complete
transformation of late-twentieth-century America journalism, at least in
television. The one profession that has grown disproportionately since
the early seventies has been the number of lawyers let loose in the
land. That has something to do with it. But journalists were shunted
aside when lawyers were ordained as the priests of cable news commentary.

Creatures of the event rule now, especially in political reporting.
Take, for instance, Dick Morris, Clinton's buddy and bete noir (and the
only person he immediately told the "truth" to about Monica Lewinsky),
whose disgraceful fall only added to his notoriety, hence his fame. It's
as if Bedlam has produced the talent pool. Morris has the most painful
smile ever seen on television. He knows he must smile, but it hurts so
much. Much more than a wince.

Television news, especially the cable outlets, is now staffed by
former campaign consultants and lawyers. At the heart of both
professions is the need to mask the truth from outside observers. Or,
more bluntly, both groups are paid to lie. This is what journalism has
come to: the messengers, at the most, are converts to the straight and
narrow, repentant sinners, asking for our trust.

(And print journalism is only marginally better, as these books all
attest. Isikoff, who in a more tawdry way than Woodward has become part
of the story [his subtitle: "A Reporter's Story"]. Which is why we are
reading his story. Isikoff understands the difference between print and
television all too well. Given the opportunity to listen to the Tripp
tapes, he at first declines. Among the reasons he offers is this: "And I
was in a bit of a hurry to make it to Hardball." Why, I've only been
working this Clinton sex beat for years now, but I am booked on TV and I
have my priorities straight!)

Stephanopoulos follows in the tried and true Iron Triangle tradition
(Lobbyists, government worker, journalist): Boot camp in politics, and
onto the television set thereafter. It is much like former badly-paid
prosecutors who become far richer defense attorneys: first they must get
to know a lot of criminals personally. George quotes Clinton
complaining, "...I never should have brought anyone under forty into the
White House." And, after reading All Too Human, one tends to agree,
noting that would have left Monica out in the cold, too.

Which brings me to the two Brits, both tilling different forms of
celebrity journalism. These books are all subsets of celebrity
journalism. Forget old or new journalism; in fiction there are two
forms: one sort about people who will never read about
themselves, the other about people who will read about themselves, who
are readers. In journalism, there are also two sorts today: about the
famous and the unknown, and by the famous or the unknown.

Andrew Morton and Christopher Hitchens are the purest writers under
consideration. One writes about celebrities, the other has attempted to
become one. But what both men can do first and foremost is write,
whereas writing comes unnaturally to George Stephanopoulos, Bob
Woodward, and Michael Isikoff. What that group does best is investigate,
interview, fawn, serve or berate, but when actual writing is the
subject, they huff and puff.

But not the Brits. Doubtless it has to do with education and
tradition. I was surprised by only one book in this batch and it was
Morton's. His control of the material was impressive. All that time
spent with Princess Di did not go to waste; he knows how to package and
he knows what real people (such as himself) might raise as objections to
his subject. Like George talking to Eric Alterman's tape recorder,
Monica avoided various gag orders (of the legal sort) by having Morton
pen her tale. The weakest aspect is his flight to decorum when it comes
to the physical aspects of Monica's trysts with the boy from Arkansas.
Morton doesn't even ascend to the heights of Barbara Cartland
romanticism in the little recounting he does do. Ah, more's the pity.
Perhaps Monica wished to save something for her memoir, other than the
depictions in the Starr Report. Choosing an English author was not
necessarily a stroke of genius, but it was certainly smart. Any American
author would have had a difficult time keeping a straight face. But
it did not keep me from speculating on what, let's say, Joyce Carol
Oates could have done with the material, or Robert Stone, or, for that
matter, Bret Easton Ellis; or the hearse-chasing Lawrence Schiller, once
Norman Mailer's collaborator. In fact, it could have been Mailer's swan
song: first Jesus' Story, then Monica's! One can only imagine.

Morton does presume (as I do, also) that most readers of his book
will have already looked to the Starr Report for the gamey details; he
steers any reader not familiar with them to that amazing document, in
any case. (The Starr Report must be the apotheosis of what has been
taught in law schools for the last decade and a half, a low bow to
Stanley Fish and the narratology he has inspired in the legal
profession, though one of the Report's principal assemblers had the
additional benefit of fiction writing workshops, another influential
stream in the academic culture of the last twenty years.)

Morton has Monica muse about her years in the White House as
effectively as George Stephanopoulos, certainly as insightfully:

In the taxi on the way to the airport to return to Washington, she burst into
tears. It truly hit home that her dream of working at the White House
was over. She had lived with the idea for so long, had had her hopes of
a return raised and then dashed,...Now, seeing another office in another
city, and being considered for a post involving a wholly new line of
work, that hope had finally been extinguished. "I realized then that no
office atmosphere would ever compare to the White House," she says. "It
was very painful to come to terms with that bitter disappointment."

Here is George on the same subject, visiting for the first time
after he left the White House, a visit that does not include seeing the
president:

...a uniformed agent reached into the room to close the
four-inch-thick door facing the Oval's formal entrance. The president
was in. My heart beat more rapidly. My stomach floated with
butterflies....I didn't know what to do. Walking in on the president
during one of his rare moments alone seemed presumptuous. Walking by
without saying hello seemed rude. I was suddenly shy, and slightly
afraid. This was not my place anymore. Clinton was still president, but
I could no longer maintain the illusion that he was somehow my president
in some special way. Not knowing what to do at that moment was the
surest sign that I didn't belong.

All these authors have something to hide and reading them all is one
way to see what that might be for each individual case. Woodward hides
his all too often personal involvement, his hope to be above the fray,
though by now he is his own Heisenberg principle. As I wrote in my book
on the '96 presidential campaign
, Woodward has always been the oddest
kind of "investigative" reporter: an ardent supporter of the status quo.

Isikoff hides, though none too well, his function as a sewer system,
which only channels information, rather than his preferred image of the
guy with his hands on the shut-off valves. George hides what he knows,
self-censors, in the tradition of Matalin and Carville, and tries to
find a way to be the supposed conveyor of "inside" information, usually
couched in the same circumlocutions of his explanation about his
non-diary, not-under-personal-control tape recordings. Morton may have
the least to hide, though he scurries behind decorum whenever it suits
him, though most of his role is to burnish his image, to gild the lily
that is Monica Lewinsky.

What Christopher Hitchens has to hide is perhaps more than he has
put into his small book. Though his distaste for the Clintons appears so
fundamental it seems to be a case of old-fashioned visceral prejudice,
the sort I usually hear from educated Brits about, say, the Irish after
enough liquor has been poured.

As an expert on all Clinton sins it is unfortunate that at the start
of his book Hitchens gets something wrong, in his description of the
Willey affair. On page 16 he writes: Willey

had been a volunteer worker at the White House, had suddenly become a widow,
had gone in distress to the Oval Office for comfort and for a discussion about the
possibility of a paying job, and had been rewarded with a crushing
embrace, some cliched words of bar-room courtship, and the guiding by
the presidential mitt of her own hand onto his distended penis.

He gets the sequence wrong. Willey did not know she was a widow when she
went to the White House that day, did not know until later, after
Clinton's embrace, that her husband had killed himself. No one contests
that time line. I know even Homer nods, but given his need for
authority, Hitchens should avoid nodding off at all.

And, at the book's end, in his brief discussion of his 11th hour
involvement in the Senate trial, when he disclosed Sidney Blumenthal's
fraudulent flacking on behalf of the president, he complains, "It was
instantly said of me that I did what I did in order to promote this very
book - still then uncompleted," as if the fact that it was unfinished made
such a charge superfluous, even though his publisher had been
advertising the book and it had been announced some time before. As if
the manuscript's incompleteness absolves him of any thoughts to the
book's future notice.

Hitchens is in line with a number of expatriate British
intellectuals who have taken up outposts here in the States for decades.
It's part of the brain drain. And being bright as he is, Hitchens has
been doing as much as he can to be, if not in the public eye, in the
private high-society scene, securely on the D.C. journalist A-list.
Once someone has been part of the McLaughlin Group it's hard to claim
too much remove from that madding crowd. In fact, he is maddeningly
upfront about all that, in the same manner his fellow countryman,
Alexander Cockburn, has been often in the past, telling of being happy
to find more wealth and power so conspicuously available to suck up to.
Now sucking up to may not be the same thing as blowing out to, though
the phrase itself, blow job, has always been a curious one. It isn't
quite right, isn't really descriptive, though it does capture something
more metaphoric than literal.

So, in all these books, we observe the wonderful daisy chain, of
different sorts of sucking up and blowing out. Bob Woodward and his
charmed or complaisant interviewees; Michael Isikoff and his talkative
cache of ladies, including the boundary-ignoring Kathleen Willey
(Isikoff writes: "We walked to my car. 'All I want to do is hear your
story,' I said again. She understood. She said good-bye. As she did, she
was standing just a tad closer than I was accustomed to standing to a
source."); George and the President that caused so many butterflies, who
drove him to counseling and anti-depressant drugs, the same
sad cycle to which Monica had been driven by the President; Monica herself,
the only one who got to be real, not virtual, or figurative, with the
president. And Andrew Morton's courtship and knee-bending service to her
(and good service it was!). And Hitchens, more self-lovingly, perhaps,
more onanistic (if that can be), than the others, being, as he is, the
most postmodern of them all, the one most likely to be aware of all the
theories of writing as forms of masturbation.

Given the sorry state journalism has come to, one might ask what any
reader might learn about Clinton that is new from these books, news that
a cable news watcher wouldn't have picked up by now. Well, not much. But
one does learn that the presidency is not what it once might have been.
It is now middle management and that, as a friend said, is why we don't
get the best people these days applying for the job.

Now that the world is dominated by international corporations and
global financial firms, the president's role is little more than that of
the attractive account executive, the good looking fellow who handles
rich people's money. When Robert Rubin was Treasury Secretary his
nickname was President Rubin. Clinton was merely the crown prince, the
smooth underling sent out to speak at fund-raising dinners and
ceremonial occasions.

When, long ago, John Dean testified in the first go-round of
televised hearings leading to the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon,
Dean reported he said to Nixon that "there was a
cancer - within - close to the Presidency." Well, Dean was guilty of
understatement, since there was much more wrong with Nixon's presidency
than that. But Dean could have been speaking about Bill Clinton. Since
it is the presidency itself that has been diminished and more readily exposed
since Watergate (its real, continuing legacy), it is a much more
superficial world there, insofar as the surface now counts for
everything. And that is why Clinton's personal failing, his taste for
women on their knees, has had such a large consequence. If Clinton was a
man of parts, not a hollow shell, one of singular vision, of true
confidence and fixed goals, such conduct as these books outline could
have been seen as minor, an aberration rather than a trait. But since
all Clinton's many virtues are so much on the surface, such a cancer on
that surface was truly unsightly.

Given the old sort of triangulation, reading these books together is
healthy and helpful, since each of them checks the other, gives a reader
a true multiple point of view; not fake omniscience, but something that
feels like the actual story.

If Watergate was, as its perpetrators like to call it, "a third-rate
burglary," Bill Clinton's impeachment was brought about by a third-rate
conspiracy. As was true with Watergate, Clinton's sex scandal - its
revelations, the momentum of disclosures could have been stopped at any
number of points. But Clinton, like Nixon, did receive bad medical care
for the cancer on his presidency. It was small, but it was persistent
and no one who had noticed it wanted to remove it before it was too
late.

Clinton's often-cited recklessness, though, wasn't reckless as he
saw it: Monica wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't been for the
linkage, however forged, of Monica, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, and
the right-wing legal elves looking to bring Clinton, if not down, to
heel. Because of that linkage, unknown to Monica and the president, the
country got to see all that these volumes recount. It wasn't the
film-version Deep Throat's advice to young Bob Woodward, "Follow the
money," coming back again to haunt the nation, it was just an
accommodating Deep Throat and all that then inexorably followed.